Julia Hülsmann Quartet

In Full View is the third ECM album by the German pianist Julia Hülsmann, and the one on which her trio became a quartet. The new voice is the English trumpeter Tom Arthurs, whose warm, lyrical sound sits at the front of thirteen mostly short pieces, and whose arrival set the whole group writing new material.

Hülsmann heard Arthurs, then living in Berlin, in concert and asked him on the spot to work with her. After first rehearsals confirmed the fit, she kept her long-standing rhythm section of Marc Muellbauer on double bass and Heinrich Köbberling on drums, and Arthurs joined on trumpet and flugelhorn. "I can make my chords more wide, use different registers without getting in my own way," she said of having a melody player beside her. The album was recorded in June 2012 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.

All four members contribute compositions, four each by Hülsmann and Muellbauer. His Quicksilver opens the record on a low figure for piano and bass before Arthurs enters on warm, muted trumpet. Köbberling's Forever Old swings gently in 5/4, and Arthurs's own Forgotten Poetry threads a simple melody through dense ballad changes before he steps back and leaves the pianist to the trio. Three pieces come from outside: The Water by the Canadian singer-songwriter Feist, played by the trio alone, Richtung Osten by Fumi Udo, Köbberling's wife, and Nana from Manuel de Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas, given to muted trumpet.

Reviewers singled out the new partnership. In The Guardian, John Fordham called the Feist cover "a spellbinding trio account" and noted that Hülsmann's work "often unveils its secrets slowly", adding that Arthurs quickens the process. In London Jazz News in 2013, Chris Parker wrote that the quartet "constantly pull off small miracles of mutual sensitivity and poetic creativity." Fordham and John Kelman of All About Jazz both heard an echo of Kenny Wheeler in Arthurs's tone and in the group's melancholy lyricism.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2306, first released on 12 April 2013.